


Tarnished Armour

by TheLibranIniquity



Category: Primeval
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Male Friendship, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-06
Updated: 2010-05-06
Packaged: 2017-11-06 00:27:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/412709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLibranIniquity/pseuds/TheLibranIniquity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stephen bears witness to the beginning of their friendship, while Nick watches as it ends. But what of everything that comes in between?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tarnished Armour

1999

_“...And in local news, the disappearance of Central Metropolitan University lecturer Doctor Helen Cutter continues to baffle police, who have admitted they are no closer to uncovering any clues as to her whereabouts. A spokesman has said that officers are continuing to pursue all possible angles, but three months after the last positive sighting of Doctor Cutter, hopes for her safe return are -”_

Stephen turned off the television, disgusted. It couldn't be that hard to find a missing person if you _tried_ hard enough and, if it wasn't for the fact he'd probably be arrested if he showed up anywhere near the investigation, he'd have tried to track her movements from the Forest of Dean a dozen times already – and probably with a lot more success than the bloody Met.

God, he missed Helen. A fact not helped by the media – a photogenic, successful, professional woman drops off the face of the earth and the greater London press were all over it, at least until the next case was dropped on someone's desk. Everywhere Stephen had gone for the last two months he'd been bombarded with “MISSING” posters on London street corners, leaflets with information coming through his letterbox day and night, and all over the university there were help points, posters with details on how to contact police with any relevant information or sightings.

And then there was Nick Cutter. Before Helen had disappeared, Stephen had had very little contact with the man – to be honest he hadn't seen much of him afterwards, either. He had no reason to. Not with Helen...

She'd been going to leave Cutter for him. Stephen remembered her bright eyes and animated movements as she'd talked about a paper she'd written, a conference she'd attended on her own, the research she was doing independently of the department – and her husband. She was beautiful when she was fired up about something, and in the times she would talk about their relationship, Helen always talked about the bright future she and Stephen were going to share; they'd escape to somewhere away from Cutter, away from the university and the stifling bureaucracy that kept threatening her research.

Stephen's one regret remained that he'd been in Alaska when Helen had vanished, helping a friend set up a wildlife conservation project. He knew, knew with deadly certainty, that if he'd stayed, if he'd only been there when Helen needed him, none of this would have happened.

He and Helen would still have each other.

And Cutter would still be alone.

2008

Nick couldn't bring himself to watch Stephen walk out of the ARC, couldn't even bring himself to move and leave the lab first. Pride forced Stephen to keep his head high, even with the memory of a punch, but Nick knew without looking that some part of him was deeply humiliated at what had just happened. He had to be – he couldn't have changed that much, even if Helen had been –

So he didn't watch. Instead he leaned heavily against the workstation and covered his face with his hands and waited for the sound of footsteps to subside, for that final door at the end of the corridor to swing closed. For the technician still in the lab with him to mutter some excuse and leave.

The news that Helen and Stephen... it felt like he'd been hit with a sledgehammer that day in the Forest of Dean. Claudia had vanished, and his best friend had betrayed him and lied about it for years. And now they'd been seeing each other – behind everybody's backs. Behind _Nick's_ back, all this time.

No – Stephen hadn't lied about it. He had just never told Nick. The difference was infinitesimal, but it was there. Nick wondered, if he had ever asked Stephen outright – what would the younger man have said?

The door behind him opened. “Cutter?” It was Connor.

Nick forced himself to stand up straight and turn to face him.

“Stephen just... he...” Connor trailed off uncertainly. “What happened?” he asked, firmer this time.

Nick sighed. He didn't want to talk about it, didn't even know if he would be able to talk about it. Words had never been his strongest suit, much to Helen's ongoing chagrin – and with Stephen words had rarely been necessary.

“Stephen's gone.” He settled for the simplest of statements. “He made a decision and we all have to live with it.”

Connor didn't look convinced, but he nodded. “So what do we do now?” Through the glass wall behind him Nick saw Abby watching them, concern written all over her face.

“Now we find out who's working against us,” Nick said. He moved towards the door and motioned for Connor to follow him.

Stephen had made his decision. Nick would just have to live with it.

1999

Stephen stood in the middle of the Department of Zoology of Central Metropolitan University, as beleaguered students and staff moved around him. The department, such as it was, was little more than a third-floor landing with three corridors leading off it; each of those branched off again to offices, seminar rooms and rear entrances to the handful of lecture theatres in this particular building.

From his vantage point Stephen could see the offices of both Doctor Cutters; adjacent rooms at the far end of the unofficially dubbed Evolutionary Zoology department. His Doctor Cutter's office door was ajar, and the door was bare, stripped of timetables, library reference sheets and the other paraphernalia usually left out for students to take at their convenience.

The other door was shut.

Stephen moved towards the open door, brushing past the last of the students racing to or from classes. He was dimly aware that he shouldn't really be here. He'd received the letter – all of Helen's postgraduate students had received the letter, the one that explained that _in light of the current extenuating circumstances the University is prepared to arrange alternative tutoring within the department for affected postgraduate courses_ and as far as Stephen knew, most of the other dozen or so students had switched tutors. A couple had left Central Met altogether. They'd all given up on Helen.

He hadn't.

Hand on her office door, Stephen took a couple of breaths to steady himself. This wasn't the first time he'd come back to the university since returning from Alaska, but it was the first time he'd ventured near Helen's office. The other occasions had been taken up by meetings with the Dean, and some of the other zoology lecturers, all trying to persuade him to not only keep going with his degree, but to keep it with them.

He'd wondered at the time if any of them had any clue what Helen and he had meant to each other, but only an ingrained sense of propriety had held him back.

But not this time. Stephen pushed Helen's door open, and looked around her office.

It was a mess. Helen's fastidious, carefully organised space had been wrecked. Books and journals were scattered all over the floor, some twisted and bent out of shape, others left open. The two filing cabinets in the far corner had been left open, and files and papers were balanced precariously on the edges of the uneven drawers.

The desk was practically invisible under yet more strewn papers, some covered in writing, others large glossy photographs of things Stephen didn't – or couldn't – immediately recognise.

His first instinct was to tidy, to fix the mess that someone had so obviously created in Helen's absence. He started with the books, noting with growing unease that Helen had been credited as either an editor, author or contributor for each volume that had been pulled off the shelves.

He'd piled maybe half a dozen into something resembling organisation when the door behind him creaked again.

“What're you doin' in here?”

Stephen froze for less than a second before rising gracefully to his feet and turning to the newcomer. Almost immediately he wished he hadn't.

“My name's Stephen Hart,” he said as calmly as he could manage. He even stuck a hand out, inwardly marvelling when it didn't shake. “I'm one of Helen's students – you must be Nick Cutter.”

Cutter stared at him. “What're you doin' here?” he asked again. He sounded exhausted – but the smell of whisky was almost overpowering. He stared at Stephen with dull eyes and incomprehensible features, and his clothes looked like they'd been slept in for at least a week or more.

Stephen tried not to let his reaction to the sight in front of him show. It wasn't difficult. “I don't know,” he admitted eventually. He glanced around the room quickly before turning back to Cutter. “I just -”

“Yeah, I know,” Cutter muttered. He moved past Stephen to gather some of the papers covering Helen's desk. “Keep thinkin', if I go through enough of her things I'll find out why she left,” he said quietly, his accent thick enough that Stephen had to strain to make out the individual words. “Where she's gone to, when she's comin' back.”

“Have you?” Stephen asked, despite himself.

“Don't know.” Cutter sounded dangerously close to crying.

Stephen fought back the urge to scorn the man, or turn and leave as quickly as he could. His fight-or-flight response had been well honed for years; he didn't know why he was suddenly ignoring his instincts now.

“How about I finish tidying up?” he offered, surprising himself. “You shouldn't need to go through all of Helen's things again.”

At that Cutter looked pathetically grateful, nodding even as he left the office, leaving the door slightly ajar behind him, and Stephen alone with what was left of Helen.

Maybe in amongst her professional life, he would be able to find something that Cutter had missed.

Some clue to finding Helen.

2008

“Stephen's made his bed. Let him lie in it.”

This time Nick addressed Abby; this time he didn't bother to watch for her reaction. He knew from experience, past and more recent, that the young woman would follow him without question with regard to the anomaly project. That kind of loyalty both unnerved him and affirmed the growing sense that he was right – and that Stephen had got it wrong, even though he couldn't shake the knowledge that he'd had that kind of loyalty from Stephen. That seemed like a lifetime ago. _Left at the Permian, straight on 'til the next timeline..._

Nick dimly registered that Abby had left the lab, leaving him alone with the neural device they'd removed from the future predator. He turned it over in his hands a few times. The idea that Leek – that anyone – could remotely control another living being with just this small piece of technology made him cold.

He'd spent years in academia determinedly studying all the wonders of Earth's history via the fossil record and other means. All he'd ever wanted was just to understand where humanity had come from, where its place in the evolutionary chain was, and where it, along with every other species on the planet, could possibly be going in the future. Nowhere in that endeavour had outright control come into the equation.

Perhaps that was where he and Helen had differed, fundamentally. Back when they had been working alongside each other at the university Nick had been... aware of the thrall Helen held her students in, the way she revelled in making them follow her blindly from one outlandish theory to the next, under a pretext of unconventional thinking. Granted, she had cultivated some truly brilliant minds, but the rest – the ones that didn't live up to her unique and demanding standards – Nick was never sure what happened to them. They just seemed to fade away, never to be talked about by Helen over dinner, or across a desk, or between excavations at a dig site.

He'd never been sure where Stephen had fit into the bizarre equation that had been Helen's academic practice, whether he'd been one of the chosen few or the discarded majority. The man had appeared from almost out of nowhere after she had disappeared, almost ten years ago now; it had been a long running joke between them that Stephen had stayed to sort out some paperwork for his degree and never left.

Except he had left. Helen had crooked her little finger, made some siren's call that Nick refused to listen to any more, but Stephen was the one who had gone running blindly with no regard for anything or anyone else.

He was a grown man, and he had certainly never been Nick's student. He had to make his own mistakes. Nick could only hope he would survive long enough to learn from them this time around.

Except that a memory surfaced, one that Nick dimly recognised as being one of the earliest that he had of Stephen. The images were unfocused in his mind, the scenes out of order and he couldn't remember anything that had been said – even if there had been anything said at all – but he remembered vividly his reaction to Stephen that day, morning, night, whenever it had been. The first time of many that he'd stayed.

It was the feeling that he wasn't alone any more.

A new resolve established itself, and before Nick could change his mind he was half-running out of the lab, still carrying the neural device (he wasn't going to make the same mistake that he'd made with the night-vision gear from the Silurian desert), until he found Connor working intently in one of the computer labs, Abby and Jenny watching him, but from a safe distance.

Without ceremony he plonked the neural device down next to Connor and told Jenny to phone him the instant they found a possible location for Leek.

Then he left the ARC as quickly as he could, hoping he wasn't too late.

1999

After what seemed like hours, Stephen got out of bed and began pacing the length of his flat. Technically it was little more than a bedsit but, considering he was a mostly self-sustaining Ph.D. student living outside of uni halls in London, he was grateful for all the space he did have – and to himself.

The LCD clock on the video player in the far corner of the main room read 12.13AM. Stephen was surprised it was as early as that, but then again time had always dragged when he was faced with a problem and no other distractions.

He couldn't get Helen out of his mind. It had been two days since he'd encountered Cutter in her office and his subsequent tidy-up of the room had yielded nothing potentially useful to finding Helen. There was nothing in her research or publications that held any clue as to what she had been doing, or planning to do, in the Forest of Dean, and try as he might Stephen couldn't remember her ever talking about it with him. The idea that she had kept secrets from him was unsettling, even as Stephen tried to squash the thought. If she hadn't told him about something, then it was probably for a good reason.

He was on his fourth circuit, counting his paces in lieu of metaphorical sheep, when his mobile phone rang. The caller display simply said _Helen_ and Stephen couldn't help the excitement that quickly built up inside him. He fumbled to answer the call.

“Hello?”

_“Stephen Hart?”_ The voice was male, and not one that Stephen recognised. Disappointment and a multitude of other feelings filled him, and it was a long few seconds before he managed a reply.

“Who is this?”

_“Got a friend of yours here, Nick Cutter. He's not fit to drive home, can you come and get him, only we're about to close up here.”_

_He's not my friend,_ Stephen wanted to say, even as his mind quickly put the pieces together. Cutter was self-destructing even further – only this time there was a wider audience to his depravity. And he had Helen's mobile phone with him. Stephen had a sudden moment of doubt – maybe without Helen, Cutter didn't have anyone else, either. “Sure,” he replied eventually, sounding distant even to himself. “Where am I coming to?”

He was given concise directions and before he could let himself change his mind, Stephen grabbed up his car keys and left the flat.

2008

Nick stopped at the door to Stephen's flat, not sure what to do next. He had a key – that was one thing that hadn't changed between timelines – but he wasn't sure whether he should use it or not. On one hand, Stephen might not even be in (and Nick didn't want to think about the implications of that). On the other, he might not want to see Nick; in fairness, Nick wasn't even sure he wanted to see Stephen, but he was here anyway, and that had to count for something, right?

He knocked.

Moments later the door flew open, revealing a slightly out of breath Stephen, and Nick was treated to a split second of hope and excitement before it was quickly covered by something altogether more shielded and unreadable. There was a nice little bruise forming where Nick had punched him.

“What do you want?” Stephen asked, his voice giving nothing away.

Nick paused. “I'm not sure. Can I come in?”

“No.”

He probably deserved that, but Nick felt he deserved more. He tried again. “Why, Stephen?”

He was met with a cold gaze. “Why what?”

Nick paused again, torn between wanting to get this right and just leaving – letting Stephen rot in whatever merry hell he had set himself up for. “You're right,” he began slowly. “It is my way or nothing. Time was, you would have called me out on that. What happened, Stephen? What happened to us?”

“Us?” Stephen repeated. 

“Us,” Nick confirmed. “Unless all these years you were just mocking me and waiting for Helen to reappear.” He wasn't used to talking this much with Stephen – too often simple looks and gestures had sufficed. He supposed that was what happened when you spent eight years with only one other real point of contact in the world. He looked Stephen straight in the eye. “Were you? Patronising me?”

For the first time that day, uncertainty flickered across Stephen's face. Barely noticeable – but it was there. Nick doubted anyone else but him would have been able to see it. “No,” Stephen admitted, eventually. “But there's more than – more than just _us_ at stake now.”

Nick nodded. “It's Leek – Leek's the traitor.”

Stephen stared at him, speechless. “But – Helen...”

“Helen lied,” Nick said as firmly as he could. “Leek tried to kill Lester, and the rest of us, and things are only just getting started. I need you, Stephen. Can't do this without you.” He felt exhausted just from those few sentences. He knew that once, he and Stephen had been unable to lie to each other; he hoped it was still the case, even now.

“It's not that simple,” Stephen said. “Helen or you – it's not that black and white.”

“Do you love her?”

1999

The pub was almost empty when Stephen got there. Most of the lights were off, or dimmed, and the place stank of alcohol and sweat.

At a table in one corner was Cutter. He was resting his head on his arms and his breathing looked shallow, but even – he had probably passed out.

The lone barman looked up at Stephen as he stepped inside. “Hart?” he asked. When Stephen nodded, he jerked his head over to where Cutter slept, and then handed over Helen's mobile phone. “Get him out of here, would you?” 

“Sure,” Stephen muttered, moving around the pool table and various upended stools to Cutter's little corner of the world. Over here the smell of whisky was almost as bad as it had been that day in Helen's office – and judging by the empty glasses beside Cutter's head whisky wasn't the only thing he'd been drinking.

He pushed Cutter's shoulder none too gently, and received a grunt in response. Stephen pushed again, harder. “Cutter? Time to go.”

Cutter groaned, definitely awake this time. He slowly lifted himself up from the table and stared at Stephen with uncomprehending eyes. “Who're you?”

Stephen tried not to pull a face, not that it would have been noticed anyway. “It's Stephen,” he said clearly. “We met the other day in Helen's office.”

“You're one of her students,” Cutter mumbled.

Stephen nodded. “Pub's closing. It's time to go.”

Cutter looked owlishly around him, though Stephen couldn't tell how much he was taking in, or was even aware of. “I can make my own way home,” he insisted. Then his expression crumpled. “Can't go home. Empty house.”

Stephen raised his eyebrows. He doubted the man would even be able to stand up on his own, much less make it all the way home – and he understood Cutter's reticence too, in a way; God only knew he hated every minute he'd had to spend at the university since Helen's disappearance. His fight or flight response had definitely failed him, he realised, because the next words to leave his mouth were: “Come on, you can sleep this off at my place.”

Cutter slowly swung around to glare at him. Had he been sober, it might have worked. “I don't need a knight in shinin' armour,” he insisted loudly.

His armour was hardly shining, Stephen thought, but he'd made it this far. And the more he thought about it, the more of Cutter he'd seen over the last few days there had been nothing there for him to hate. Pity, yes, but he'd never seen the man Helen had painted her husband to be. He held out a hand for Cutter to take.

“How about a friend?”

2008

Stephen stared at Nick. “What?”

Nick steeled himself. “Do you love Helen?” he repeated.

“I...” Stephen broke off, uncertain again.

“I did,” Nick said, “for a long time after she disappeared. Still do, kind of.” Until she'd taken Claudia Brown from him. Until she'd taken Stephen from him, right under his nose and he'd never seen it happening.

Coldness flashed in Stephen's eyes again, but Nick pre-empted him. “Doesn't mean she's right, or that I'm wrong. Like you said, it's not black and white. But you stayed for eight years after she'd gone. You didn't have to.”

“No,” Stephen agreed quietly. “I never called you on your bullshit, either.”

Nick almost smiled. “But you could have.”

“Would you have listened?” There was a challenge now, in Stephen's face.

Nick nodded. “To you, yes.” It was the truth. It had always been the truth.

Stephen stared at him for a long few seconds. “I don't need you to save me.”

“No,” Nick agreed. The incomplete memory he'd recalled in the ARC came back, clearer and more distinct this time. “I've never been one for shining armour, anyway.”

Stephen stared at him some more. Comprehension then dawned. “What about a friend?” he asked quietly. There were still traces of suspicion and other uncomfortable things in his voice and on his face, but Nick tried not to think about those, and he tried to push the idea of Helen and Stephen out of his mind.

Nick smiled for the first time that day. “Friend sounds good.” He held out a hand for Stephen. “Come on.”


End file.
